Monthly Archives: August 2025

Church and State: Lessons from History for the Present Day

This is the Ukrainian Orthodox Viewpoint ( from the Society of Orthodox Journalists), which most Russian Orthodox also probably agree with. It begs the question as to why the once multinational Orthodox Church of All Rus, including the once free ROCOR Synod in New York which used to resist Sergianism (erastianism), has become dominated by Russian nationalist politicians, instead of Orthodox Christians, theologians and pastors. Nationalism is not the Church, but schismatic!

https://spzh.eu/en/zashhita-very/87544-church-and-state-lessons-from-history-for-the-present-day

05 August 11:06

Author: Nazar Golovko

In the history of the Russian Orthodox Church, the Church often co-operated too closely with the State.

From Peter’s reforms to the Revolution of 1917: how state dependence affected the Russian Church – and what lessons the UOC should draw from this today.

Many today wonder: how could it happen that the devout Orthodox people, the “God-bearing nation” as Dostoevsky called them, suddenly rose up against their Church after the 1917 revolution? How could those who once went to their deaths “for Faith, Tsar, and Fatherland” destroy the faith, kill the Tsar, and tear down that very Fatherland?

Indeed, what happened after 1917 defies human logic. Tens of thousands of churches were closed or wiped off the face of the earth, thousands of monasteries and sketes were destroyed, hundreds of thousands of believers were executed, thousands of priests and hundreds of bishops were murdered, and millions were buried alive behind the barbed wire of the Gulag.

How could this happen? And, more importantly – why?

To answer this question – which remains deeply relevant today – we must turn to history.

When the Church ceases to be the Body of Christ

As early as the era of Peter I, the religious life of the Russian Church was subjected to harsh and merciless criticism. On one hand, the Church was attacked for excessive attention to outward ritual forms; on the other, it had fallen under overwhelming state control. Ivan Aksakov, a Slavophile and patriot well-versed in Church affairs, once wrote:

“Thus, in terms of administration, the Church now appears as a kind of colossal bureaucracy, applying – with the inevitable, alas, official bureaucratic falsehood – the methods of German bureaucracy to the salvation of Christ’s flock… Apparently, all the Church has been granted is outward order – a semblance of proper organization…

But one trifling thing is missing: the soul is gone. The ideal has been replaced – the Church’s ideal has been supplanted by a state ideal, inner truth replaced by formal, external correctness. A new measure has been substituted for the old – a governmental measure instead of a spiritual and moral one. Everything is now weighed and measured on the State’s official scale…

The worldview of the state has, like a subtle vapor, imperceptibly seeped into the mind and soul of nearly the entire ecclesiastical environment, with few exceptions, narrowing its understanding to the point where the living sense of the Church’s true mission has become barely accessible. Nowhere is truth so feared as in our Church administration; nowhere is there such flattery as among our hierarchy; nowhere is the spirit of Pharisaism so strong as among those who ought to hate falsehood the most.”

The Church and the Authorities: harm or benefit?

Indeed, it’s hard to deny that the Church of that era had surrendered itself to imperial will. For example, Peter I’s decree of April 22, 1722, required every cleric (including bishops) upon entering holy office to swear an oath “to be a faithful, good, and obedient servant and subject to the emperor and his lawful heirs,” to defend the emperor’s rights and dignity, “not sparing even their own life if necessary,” and to report any damage or threat to imperial interests – including “theft, treason, or rebellion revealed in confession,” as well as “any evil designs against the Tsar’s honour, health, or family.”

In other words, the secular authorities demanded that Orthodox clergy violate a foundational canonical rule: the inviolability of the sacramental confession. In effect, the Church became a mere “Department of Spiritual Affairs,” heavily influenced by the Chief Procurator of the Holy Synod – a layman appointed by the Tsar.

As a result:

The Church in Russia was perceived as an extension of the state. And if the people’s hatred was directed at the state, the Church was inevitably caught in that hatred too – a sentiment that had been simmering long before 1917.

Prince Ivan Gagarin, who converted to Catholicism, wrote: “The Russian Church needs independence; it senses this itself.”

Understanding that the Church in Russia was inextricably tied to autocracy, Gagarin believed that an attack on the Tsar would inevitably strike the Church as well. Moreover, he saw the deepening schism with the Old Believers as another wellspring of discontent with autocratic rule. In his eyes, Catholicism could save Russia – because it had the spiritual freedom the Russian Church lacked. He famously wrote:

“Let us repeat: it is one or the other – Catholicism or revolution. The Russian Church is powerless; the Tsarist regime may only delay the explosion. The union of the schismatics with revolutionary movements becomes more and more inevitable. There is no time to lose. I see no other way to avert this threat than a national Russian-Catholic clergy.”

Thus, Gagarin understood that the Russian Church – having bound itself so tightly to the state – lacked the strength to confront the revolutionary currents rising among the Old Believers and even within the lower clergy.

Church and Revolution

Here is just a short list of well-known revolutionaries who came from clergy families:

  • Nikolai Chernyshevsky (1828–1889), a major theorist of Russian revolution, son of a priest in the Saratov Eparchy; educated in a religious school and seminary.
  • Sergei Nechaev (1847–1882), organizer of the underground group “People’s Retribution” and a symbol of fanatical revolution; son of a deacon from Nizhny Novgorod province.
  • Nikolai Kibalchich (1853–1881), member of “Narodnaya Volya” and chief designer of the bomb that killed Alexander II; son of a priest in the Chernihiv Diocese.
  • Mikhail Novomirsky (Tikhomirov) (1850–1884), activist of “Narodnaya Volya”; son of a priest.
  • Alexander Mikhailov (1855–1884), one of the leaders of “Narodnaya Volya” and its Executive Committee; son of a rural priest.
  • Vladimir Ulyanov (Lenin) – came from a clerical estate.

Besides, let us not forget the failed seminarian Stalin.

And this is just the tip of the iceberg.

There are hundreds, if not thousands, of names of priest’s children who became revolutionaries. And many of them did not merely sympathize with revolutionary causes – they actively took part in terror and assassinations.

Why?

Because they saw the hypocrisy and servility that had become entrenched in the lives of their fathers.

Because they understood: the Church, subordinated to the state, had ceased to be a spiritual mother and had become a cog in the bureaucratic machine. And if that machine needed to be destroyed – so did its parts.

A Fatal Union

Thus, the revolution in Russia was not just a popular uprising. It was, in many ways, the outcome of an unhappy marriage between Church and state. A Church bound hand and foot by the government was unable to serve as the voice of conscience. In the end, it remained silent – or even offered its blessing – as the old order was dismantled.

For example, on March 5, 1917, just two days after Tsar Nicholas II’s abdication, the Holy Synod declared:

“The Holy Church of Christ greets the recent events as a mercy of God upon our people… May the Lord bless the Provisional Government and grant it strength to perform the work of serving the people.”

As a result, those forces that destroyed the Tsar turned their wrath on the Church as well. And the reason is clear: when the Church becomes part of the state, people see it as a target – not as the Body of Christ.

What about today?

Yes, the current situation of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church seems unbearably difficult to many of us. We are forbidden to pray as our ancestors did for centuries. Our churches are being taken away. The authorities are doing everything in their power to erase the UOC from Ukraine’s religious landscape.

But—

Perhaps this is, in fact, a blessing from God. A blessing that the Church should be free from all state dependence, so that it may possess the inner liberty necessary to fulfill its true mission – the preaching of the Gospel.

It may seem that without the “roof” of state protection or official patronage, the Church is weak and exposed. But maybe this is precisely the path Christianity calls us to walk – not to please power, but to serve the people.

And perhaps, painful as it is, a Church free from State dependence is walking a blessed path.

 

Three World Wars For Nothing?

‘It’s not peace, but a twenty-year long truce’.

Prediction of Georges Clemenceau, Prime Minister of France, about the Versailles Peace Treaty in 1919

‘If we aim at the impoverishment of Central Europe, vengeance, I dare say, will not limp. Nothing can then delay for very long the forces of Reaction and the despairing convulsions of Revolution, before which the horrors of the later German war will fade into nothing, and which will destroy, whoever is victor, the civilisation and the progress of our generation’.

Prediction in the book The Economic Consequences of the Peace by John Maynard Keynes, about the Versailles Peace Treaty in 1919

Introduction: Lives Destroyed By Futile Wars

I was brought up in a world shaped by the results of two World Wars. The lives of my parents, uncles and aunts (the men fought, several of the women, one was a victim of the London Blitz, were spinsters – there were too few men left to marry) had all been deeply affected by the Second World War, those of my grandparents, great-uncles and great-aunts (soldiers and spinsters) deeply affected by the First World War. They talked of little else, as their once peaceful and settled lives had been disfigured by the Wars. As for me I was born in the year of the Anglo-French invasion of Egypt, when the USA planted the last nail into the coffin of the British Empire, and Soviet tanks entered oppressed Budapest. Looking back today, as once more the Western world is at war against Russia, I cannot help seeing the continuity of these wars. However, I also see their futility, as they merely put off the inevitable rise of Russia, even though it repeatedly attempted suicide in its history in movements of spiritual apostasy.

Three ‘World’ Wars To Destroy Russia

We use the term ‘World Wars’ to describe the global disasters that were in fact European Wars, or more precisely Wars for the control of Russia. Thus, the First World War (1914-18) began after the Austrian annexation of Bosnia, the Second World War (1939-1945) began after the German annexation of Poland, and what I here call the Third World War (2022-2025?) began after the Western annexation of the Soviet Ukraine. All these wars were in reality the attempts by the ruling classes of Austro-Hungary and its allies, Germany and its allies, and the USA and its European vassals, respectively, to gain control of the territory (‘Lebensraum’) and natural resources of the Eastern half of Europe (from the Soviet-fixed borders of the Ukraine to the Volga, Stalingrad and Astrakhan). All have essentially been wars directed against the three different Russias, Imperial Russia, the Soviet Union and the Russian Federation, caused by the desire of the Western world to exploit and plunder its wealthy neighbour, which occupies the Eastern half of Geographical Europe and all Siberia as far as the Pacific.

Moreover, all these wars were underpinned and propagandised by a racist ideology which believes that Western Europeans, the Germanic and Latin, so-called ‘Aryan’, peoples, are racially superior to all others. This infers the racial inferiority of Slavs (Serbs/Poles/Russians etc), Jews, Gypsies etc to Western Europeans and their white descendants in the USA, Australia, Canada and elsewhere. In the Second World War this ideology came to be called ‘Nazism’, though its racist nature was already apparent in the First World War, but not by that name. Nazism conquered or subdued all of Western Europe in the Second War. In the Third World War all the Western countries, once more deployed against Russia, sometimes openly share this same ideology. It is most obvious with the SS-inspired armed forces in what is the Soviet Ukraine, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, but also in the EU, where many of the main unelected Eurocrats and representatives like von der Leyen, Kallas, Baerbock or Metreweli, the head of the foreign spy service of the UK, are the grandchildren of Nazis.

This myth of racial superiority has been a constant throughout the last millennium of Western European history. The Russians first experienced it in a letter from Pope Hildebrand (Gregory VII) sent to Yaroslav of Russia in 1075, demanding submission. Next came the Russian defeat of the invading Teutonic Knights in 1242. It is precisely this hubristic conviction of superiority which lies behind the continual defeats of the West. These defeats, Napoleon’s, Hitler’s and Trump’s, all come from underestimating Russian realities. Thus, Russia is ‘only a regional power showing weakness’ (Obama, 2014) or ‘a gas station masquerading as a country’ (McCain, 2015). Its losses, according to Western propagandists, are ten times its real losses and ‘it has no more missiles, tanks, bombs, shells or troops’, who are being sent to Ukrainian lines ‘to die in human waves’. These people live in Hollywood and have grown accustomed to believing their own lies. The lies are written by Western PR scriptwriters, exaggerated by the Kiev Ministry of Propaganda, and then believed by stupid politicians.

The First War is called a World War only because it involved British colonial troops mainly from the Indian subcontinent and the Caribbean, as well as Australians, New Zealanders, Canadians and then Americans, and French colonial troops mainly from Africa, and also involved skirmishes with German colonial troops in Africa. The Second War is called a World War only because it also involved the same colonial troops as well as American troops and took place in the Anglo-German battle for the control of oil in the Middle East and the war of the USA and the UK against Japan for control of the Pacific. And the Third War can be called a World War only because it indirectly involves BRICS, notably China, India, Iran and North Korea, and its other supporters in ‘the Global South’ of Africa, Asia and Latin America. This is the first War in which the West is isolated and in a tiny and technologically weaker minority, it is the 10% against the 90%. Therefore, it has always been clear who will eventually win and clear that the West was made foolish by hubris to fantasise that it could win.

In other words, all these Wars began in Eastern Europe and involved failed invasions of Russia, which Western Europe wanted to take over and exploit. This had already been rehearsed before them in 1812 under Napoleon with his collective, multinational invasion of Russia by ‘the French and the twelve tribes’. (However, others like the Poles and the Swedes had tried and failed even before him and the Anglo-French had tried again in 1853-56). Thus, it can be said that all three World Wars were ‘Napoleonic’, that is, failed Pan-Western attempts to destroy Russia. Napoleon, Nazi and NATO – those three even begin with the same two letters. All of them had been prepared, for tensions between the European Powers had been brewing for years, especially in the Far East (1904-05) and the Balkans from 1908 on. And Germany had been preparing for war under Hitler since 1933. As regards today’s war, it began with the overthrow in Kiev in 2014, followed by covid (a US bio-war virus, backfired on it and its allies) and the threatened genocide by the Kiev puppet regime of Eastern Ukraine.

This full-scale physical and cultural genocide of Eastern Ukrainians, already prepared on a low level (nearly 15,000 men, women and children murdered in the Donbass, as well as in Kiev and Odessa) between 2014 and early 2022, had been programmed by NATO, of which the separatist Kiev regime was already a de facto member, for March 2022. This threat provoked the initially small-scale Russian intervention in February 2022 there, in what until 1922, exactly a century before, had been part of Russia. Once the Western Powers forbade their puppet-regime in Kiev to sue for peace with Russia in March-April 2022 under its envoy Johnson, this developed into a full-scale war against Russia by the Kiev regime proxies, Western-trained, Western-supplied, Western-informed, Western-armed, Western-biolabbed, and Western-financed. It is this Russian war to deSovietise the Soviet-established Ukraine which continues today, three and a half years later, with Russia and the BRICS world victorious. Western leaders officially deny it because on admission they would have to resign.

After The Three World Wars

Our question is what would have happened if the three interdependent World Wars, in fact Anti-Russian Wars I, II and III (like the preparatory Anglo-American-financed anti-Russian War, launched by their Japanese proxy in 1904) had not taken place. Would the situation of the world be any different today from it would have been without those Wars? Of course, no definitive answer can be given to this question – we shall never know, because the three World Wars did take place, with their fifty million and more dead in Europe alone. However, we can make some striking observations.

Inside Europe, in 1914 Germany dominated Western Europe economically, technologically and militarily, not only because of its heavy industry with iron and steel, but also through its advanced engineering, chemical, electrical and automotive industries. But this was exactly the situation at least until 2022. Then began the deindustrialisation of Germany, enforced by the US cutting off its energy supplies from Russia, and the end of a Germany which had been the engine of the EU, the heart of the EU economy.

In 1914 France played a secondary role in Western Europe, albeit a jealous, petulant and resentful role, as a result of its defeat at German hands in the Franco-Prussian War in 1870. This is the role it still plays in Western Europe today. In 1914 the Imperialist British ruling class looked to its role overseas, outside Europe, especially to the USA and India. This is the role it still plays today, though today the roles have been reversed. The UK, its snobbish and arrogant, fantasy-driven ruling class, stuck in the past, paradoxically still not de-Imperialised, is in fact dependent on its former colonies, rather than they being dependent on the UK.

In 1914 Russia dominated Eurasia (Northern Asia, the vast area from Eastern Europe to China), as Tsar Nicholas had opened the Russian ‘Window on Asia’ by insisting on the completion of and inaugurating the Trans-Siberian railway. He considered that Siberia would be to European Russia what North America had been to Western Europe. In 1913 it was estimated by Edmond Thery, the French economist, that by 1950 Russia would ‘dominate Europe politically, economically and financially’. However, in 1914 there was the German-led War against the Russian Empire, a British-orchestrated Revolution through Russian traitors, Western invasions after 1917, a German-led invasion in 1941, murdering 27 million, and for several years after 1991 the plunder of the Russian Federation by the Western world, as a result of which millions died prematurely in mafia crime, starvation, suicide and alcoholism borne of despair.

Despite the present tragic, post-Soviet conflict, one of whose aims is to deSovietise the Soviet Ukraine and restore the real, historic Ukraine (Malorossija), the three generations wasted by Marxism meant that the Russian economy became the largest in Europe only in 2024, 74 years after the predicted 1950. And 74 years was exactly the period during which Russia was taken over by the idiotic Western ideology of Marxism (1917-1991), sent by Germany in the form of Lenin to contaminate the Russian Western-educated class, who also designed the absurd borders of the Soviet Ukraine. Nevertheless, by 2024 the Russian economy had at last become the largest economy in Europe, indeed the fourth largest in the world, just as it had already been in pre-Soviet, Imperial 1914. Thus, the Three World Wars had only delayed the inevitable and the development of the future deWesternised, but once more Imperial (but not Imperialist, as it is deWesternised) Russia.

Outside Europe, in 1914 the USA was trying to dominate Latin America (starting with its land-grab from Mexico in 1846), Hawaii (1893), the Caribbean (Cuba (1898)), the Philippines (1902), and the Pacific in general, in rivalry with Japan (1941-45). Nothing has changed, though its imperialist delusions of today, now embodied in the egomaniac Trump’s ‘Make Israel Great Again’ government, run by the fanatical Zionist Lindsey Graham, are ‘globalist’. This is the dream of planetary rule by infantile tantrum and protection racket bullying, salesman’s ultimatum and deadline. He is a man who deploys nuclear submarines because his social media comment was contradicted by a Russian politician! As for China and India, their role in 1914 was negligible, as they were then controlled by Western colonialism.  However, today they have returned to what they were before any Western colonisation, 300 years ago, becoming the greatest industrial powers in the world, China at No 1 and India at No 3, even according to distorted official Western PPP figures.

Conclusion: The New World Order

As a whole, the world is returning to the situation of before 1914, though only in the sense that the world then was multipolar, that is, it was being led by a concert of Great Powers, and not One Power. All that has changed is the names of the Great Powers. But perhaps they would have changed anyway, without all the bloodshed of Three ‘World’ Wars, of attacks to destroy Russia, which is what the EU foreign representative Kallas so ardently and publicly proclaims as her aim? (But then Kallas comes from a Nazi family). In so many respects these Wars form one continuous War, interrupted by long, but temporary ceasefires. Then the Great Powers were the now collapsed empires of Western Europe, together with Russia and the USA. Today there are the Four Great Powers of China, Russia, the USA and India, as well as countries from Latin America (Brazil), Africa (South Africa and Ethiopia) and the Muslim world (Indonesia and Iran). This is the New World Order which has already begun.